S i x D e g r e e s
by mixed.vinyl
Summary: The bishop falls, the die tumbles and the top spins, all around one centre.  Chance pulls them there, but it is necessity that keeps them together, searching.  Because chance is only an excuse for the unknown.
1. To Run and Fall

I'm going to experiment with this one. A friend of mine suggested I incorporate more order and mathematics into my writing, whatever that means. This may cause some strangeness as the story progresses. More than ever, reviews are much appreciated.

This is not a sequel to Matryoshka.

Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.

_- Li_

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><p><strong>S i x D e g r e e s<strong>

_Of Erdős, Shusaku and Karinthy_

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><p><em><strong>r u n , r u n , r u n .<strong>_

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><p><em>Dear Ariadne,<em>

_It is with great pleasure that we congratulate you on your acceptance to the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation's Doctorate Program in Architecture at Columbia University. We are highly impressed with your consistently high achievements both academically and in the workplace, and look forward to seeing you at our campus in the fall. Your skills and talent would be a welcome addition to not just our faculty, but the school community._

_Further details regarding your admission, including scholarship, housing and visa details will be mailed to you at a later date. As there are an overwhelming number of candidates still on our waitlist, please note that you must accept your offer by June 1__st__ and deposit a non-refundable, $500 registration fee directly to the Faculty of Architecture in order to maintain your spot on our list of incoming students for the coming academic year._

_Once again, congratulations, and welcome to the faculty!_

Professor Miles looked up from the letter with an unreadable expression. "Well?" he asked in a detached, almost disinterested voice.

Ariadne cleared her throat and shoved both hands deep into her pockets so he wouldn't see them fidgeting at her sides. Miles was by far her favourite professor at the university, and likely the best teacher she'd ever had. It was usually no harder to talk to him than to her friends, but there were times when he would fix her with a particularly nonchalant look that gave her the impression he was actually scrutinizing her every movement. Times like now, when all she really wanted was a yes or no answer.

She coughed again. "Well…"

He leaned forward in his chair. "You want me to tell you whether or not you should accept?"

She clenched her fists tightly in her sweater and tried to keep her breathing quiet and even.

Smiling, he handed the letter back to her and propped his elbows up on the desk. "Columbia is a very prestigious school," he started, sliding smoothly into lecturing mode. "I taught a semester there years ago. The campus library alone is worth a trip. And of course, the architecture faculty and alumni are all very famous."

Her heart dropped down several notches to somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach. If he told her she should go… Well, Ariadne would be extremely sorry to disappoint him, but there was little she could do now. She had made her decisions weeks ago; although it did seem to her as if her whole life had been spent hurtling towards this one crossroad.

A knowing smile stole over Miles' face as he watched her. "You've already refused the offer, haven't you?"

Ariadne bit her lip rather sheepishly. She might have lied – she came very close to lying – but in the end, the faintest glimmer of amusement in Miles' smile saved her.

"I turned them down the day after I got the letter," she admitted.

Her professor clapped his hands together. In the empty lecture hall, the sound resounded loudly all the way up to the high rafters and back.

"I'm glad you did," he said, to Ariadne's infinite relief. "Columbia is absolutely wonderful, and if you'd asked me a few months ago, I would have insisted you go. But in light of recent…_events_, I don't think you want another degree."

"Do you think-" Ariadne began, but he waved a hand to cut her off.

"You could lead a perfectly agreeable life as an architect," he said. "There are a dozen firms in France alone that would be delighted to have you work for them. But would you be happy?"

She tugged at the trailing end of her scarf and said nothing. The truth was that she _could_ be happy; she would always be happy so long as she had a pen and a stack of blank cocktail napkins at her disposal. Yet happiness didn't equate living, and what was life without dreams? She could probably manage to eat and breathe and sleep without dreaming, but she would also have to spend each day watching life pass her by, one frame of regret at a time.

Miles, as always, understood her silence better than words. He let out a long sigh and buried his head in his hands. Ariadne watched the display with a heightening sense of alarm as his face failed to reappear. For a fleeting second, she almost changed her mind.

"I had hoped," he finally murmured through his fingers, "that I would not have to watch another one of my students exploit their considerable talents and make themselves miserable in the bargain."

"I'm sorry," said Ariadne, but she was afraid that the apology came out sounding more than a little impertinent. She winced. Tact had never been her strong suit.

Miles shook his head. "Don't apologize." His voice was steadier now, and he had lowered his hands from his face. "It's as much my fault as it is yours. Genius can never help itself, but I should have known better than to introduce you to Dom. If I'd picked someone less talented, we might not be here."

"If pigs had wings they might be pigeons," she reminded him, and he smiled at the recollection of his favourite saying, one that he'd often used whenever a student had brought up a particularly meaningless point.

"I'm getting too old for this," said Miles after a while. "Once your students start outsmarting you, you know it's time to get a pension." With a sigh, he pulled off his glasses, rubbed them carefully on his sleeve and made to put them back on. Halfway there, he stopped and dropped them on his desk. They landed awkwardly, but remained whole.

"So you've made up your mind already. Why are you still looking for my advice?"

Ariadne swallowed, or tried to, but her mouth was suddenly dry. When she tried again, she fared little better and gave it up as a lost cause.

"Last time, Cobb gave me his number, in case something happened," she explained. "But he's not around anymore, and I-"

"-need to find someone who can get you into the business," Miles finished. He frowned. "Do you really think I'm going to help one of my best students throw her life away?"

At his question, she felt herself start to bristle like a porcupine. _He_ might have seen it as throwing her life away, but for Ariadne, this was her one chance at ever having a life at all and she was not about to let it escape her grasp without some kind of fight.

"I've found extractors in Paris who're willing to give me a job," she lied bluntly. "But Cobb always said his team was the best."

"They're certainly the craziest," said Miles with a tinge of bitterness. Ariadne wondered if he was remembering his daughter, and the dreams and crazy experiments that had eventually driven her to take her own life. "But you couldn't get far in the business without some craziness," he conceded, half to himself. "And I suppose if you're set on doing this, the least I can do is make sure you don't end up with a gang of hoodlums." He reached into his desk and pulled out a file card, onto which he scribbled a few lines.

"This is Arthur's number," he told her. "He's a little saner than the rest of them. He'll take good care of you."

Ariadne took the card and shoved it into her pocket with her bishop. She hadn't needed to use the totem for a while, but nonetheless, it comforted her to know that it was there.

"Thanks," she mumbled, slightly ashamed of her outright lie, especially when she saw the weary look of disappointment on his face.

He smiled, or tried to. It came out looking rather forced. "Come back and visit before you start gallivanting around the globe. Bring Arthur with you if he's around. I haven't seen him in years. I won't be here next week, but the week after should be fine."

She looked at him curiously. "What's happening next week?"

"Hip replacement." Miles grimaced. "One of the many disadvantages of old age." He cut off her questions with a shake of his head. "It's nothing to worry about. I would worry more about myself, if I were you." His voice turned serious once more. "You remind of Dom, you know."

"Do I?" she asked, genuinely surprised. She couldn't decide whether it was a compliment to be held up to the best extractor in the world, or to be worried that she was being compared to someone whose subconscious was just a shade unbalanced.

Miles picked up his glasses from the desk and turned them around in his hands. "There's no denying that you're both brilliant architects," he said, addressing his glasses. "But you worry me." He looked up and fixed Ariadne with one of the piercing stares that always left her feeling mentally exposed. He sighed and closed his eyes.

"One of these days, you're going to have to stop running away from reality."

Before she could ask what he meant, there was the sound of a soft knock at the back of the room. Ariadne turned and saw a group of her classmates at the door, waiting to speak to the professor. She thanked him again, muttered a hasty goodbye, and hurried out another door.

In the echoing silence of the halls – empty for the summer – she slowed down and pulled Arthur's number out of her pocket. The rapid thump of her heart against her ribcage nearly drowned out her footsteps on the tiled floor. Funny the strange things a few digits could do to her pulse. Carefully, she placed the card back in her pocket. She wouldn't call – not yet, anyway. The loose ends of the old life had to be snipped and tied before she could move on to the new one.

She would start with her apartment. Of the seven years she'd lived in Paris, she'd spent five of them in the tiny rooms just across from the university. It seemed only right to start wrapping up her life in the comfort of its walls. The apartment was not hers, and once she left, someone else would be bound to move in. Apartments close to the university were always in high demand. Of course, with all the money from the Fischer job, she could have easily rented a larger flat, or bought the entire building, but a reluctance to let go had kept her. Besides, even then, she had already started to form vague plans of a future that did not involve permanent living in any one place.

When she surveyed the work ahead of her, Ariadne came quite close to giving up. It took her a moment to realize that it wasn't so much that her apartment was small as that she had crammed it with too many knick knacks. Piles of textbooks and novels were littered all over the floor, just waiting to stab an unsuspecting victim's foot. The walls had once been papered with pale lilacs, but now they were covered with posters of everything from space shuttles to Impressionist paintings. Her old school projects were balanced haphazardly on stacks of half folded laundry. When her friends had teased her about her chronic untidiness, she had argued that it was all organized chaos – she could always find anything she wanted within five minutes. Now, she wondered if it might not be smarter to call Arthur first. If he refused to help her or if – her heart skipped a beat – Miles had given her the wrong number, she would at least be able to save herself the trouble of packing up.

Yet something held her back. A vague feeling that she needed more time. Was it fear or anxiety? Or perhaps a small nagging voice at the back of her head, warning her, as Miles had said, to stop running?

In the end, she decided to take her mother's advice and sleep on it.

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><p><em><strong>f a l l i n g , f a l l i n g , f a l l i n g .<strong>_

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><p>He woke up in the middle of the night, dizzy and shaking, covered in a shower of cold, clinging sweat, to a dark and silent room. In that fractional second between sleep and consciousness, there was no memory of where he was or how he got there. And he thought, <em>this is it<em>, and lunged for the well-worn Beretta. Only when his fingers brushed chipped coffee cup ceramic instead did he remember to breathe. In an excruciatingly slow rush of recognition, the details of the room sharpened and leaped into focus. The flowered wallpaper, handpicked by his wife and her mother, the dresser set that had taken hours to assemble, the faded snapshots taped crookedly to one pane of the custom French windows. The fistfuls of blankets in his hands that smelled of lilac and nostalgia.

There could be no sleep now, perhaps not ever. With a Herculean effort, he swung his trembling limbs out of bed and groped his way in the semidarkness to the bathroom across the hall. He was still only half awake, but old habits had always died hard with him and in spite of the dull ache in his head, he remembered to step around the creaky floorboard in front of his daughter's room. It had been a joke, that floorboard. The carpenter had just about died laughing when they'd asked for a squeaky board barring each of their children's bedrooms, in case they should ever try to sneak out of the house as they grew older. It had been more her idea than his, and now she would never see it completed.

In the bathroom, he switched on the frog shaped night light that his son had insisted on. Its muted green was much kinder to his eyes than the ceiling light's fluorescent glare, but did little for his complexion. Staring at the reflection in the mirror, he almost didn't recognize his own face peering back. His hair was a mess and in desperate need of a trip to the barber's, and the stubble on his chin was more than a few days old. Somehow, there never seemed to be enough space in a day now, between school and soccer and ballet and meals and laundry and a hundred and one other sundry matters that he had never noticed before. It baffled him, how he had gone from creating time to chasing after it in the space of a plane ride.

His hair was not the only less than appealing feature in the glass. There were lines on his face that had not been there the last time he'd been in this house; small lines around the corners of his mouth and deep furrows between his eyes that aged him beyond his thirty odd years. It had only really been two years, hanging onto the thinnest traces of reality, living for the sound of childish voices whispering through cheap speakers.

Two years multiplied by seventeen extractions, plus several hundred trial runs and too many solitary 'experiments' to count, with a trip to limbo to top it all off.

These days, he tried not to think too hard. It helped that he'd stopped wearing a watch.

Still, he could count. Math had never been his strength – a sticking point with his university professors, who had declared him a genius in every other respect – but that most basic of skills had not yet deserted him. He would never find peace until it did. After lifetimes spent counting seconds, it had become second nature, whenever there was a momentary lull, to tick off the seconds in his head. Twenty seconds since he'd started counting sheep. Seven seconds until the end of triple overtime. Three hundred seconds before the egg timer would explode into a cacophony of unpleasant crowing.

As his daughter often pointed out with an air of smugness, only roosters crowed.

He lived for those moments now. Moments in between preschool tantrums and scraped knees and muddy footprints trailing through the clean kitchen – because his children were a long way from perfect – when he remembered what it felt like to be in love. Sometimes, when those moments were particularly sparse, he found himself doubting his decision to come back, although there had not been much thought of choosing at the time. There were nights when, with the world fast asleep, he became desperate to dream again, not of painful, sepia memories, but of wonderful impossibilities that soared up beyond the clouds. He missed the thrill of somnacin slipping into his veins and the jerk of a kick pulling him awake. It was like a phantom limb plaguing at his body with an ache so terrible that he could not sleep.

Tonight was one of those nights.

With a vicious tug, he wrenched the faucet on and stuck his head under the pounding jet of cold water. The icy deluge made it hard to think about much besides the physical pain of his skin freezing over, unless it was to wonder about the possibility of hypothermia setting in. Over the numbing rush of water, he did not hear the creaking floorboard or the sound of small, bare feet on tiles.

"Daddy?"

He spun around on his heel and nearly cracked his elbow on the sink's marble countertop. His daughter was standing at the bathroom door, peering up at him through puffy, half-closed eyes. When he caught sight of her, with her long hair sticking up in every direction and her baggy pyjamas trailing on the floor, he remembered exactly who and where he was. The world spun around several times before settling back into its familiar pattern. Reaching behind him, he closed the tap to the sound of silence ringing in his ears and crouched down on the floor. He spread his arms open a little and she tumbled obediently into them.

"What are you doing out of bed?"

She dug her tiny nose into his shoulder. "I had a nightmare," she mumbled.

His grip on her tightened with his heart. "About what?"

She wriggled in his arms and he adjusted his hold until she stopped. After a while, she leaned her mouth next to his ear and whispered, "There's a monster caterpillar under my bed" before bursting into tears.

At the last moment, he caught himself and remembered not to laugh. He'd done that the first time his son had come diving into his bed in the middle of the night, crying about the mummy that lived in the dining room clock. The result had been more tears and a severe scolding from his mother-in-law. Instead, he brushed his fingers through his daughter's hair silently until her sobs showed signs of dying down. Then he sat back on his heels and wiped the tearstains from her face with his thumbs. It was not exactly the most efficient method, but he had washed all the towels earlier and forgotten to dry them.

"What did the caterpillar look like?" he asked seriously.

His daughter hiccoughed several times and sniffed loudly. "Hairy."

He smiled to himself. "And?"

"It had twenty thousand legs and one big eye right here." And she jabbed a finger into his forehead, to illustrate the eye's exact position.

He grimaced in mock horror. "You think it's still under your bed?"

She nodded vigorously, knotted hair swinging up and down. He felt a brief stab of jealousy that she could be so certain on the dividing lines between dreams and reality. Still, he swung her up off the floor, albeit not nearly as effortlessly as he had once been able to manage, and carried her briskly around the creaky floorboard to her room.

It was dark inside, darker than he remembered it from years ago. Back then, she had been terrified of the dark and there had been a veritable parade of nightlights and glow-in-the-dark mobiles in her room. Now the only light came from the moonbeams peaking through the cracks between the curtains. A tangled lump of blankets lay in the middle of the bed. He reached a hand out to the light switch by the door, but she grabbed his fingers and held on grimly.

"If you turn on the light, he'll disappear," she informed him solemnly.

"Why didn't you turn them on, then?"

She gave him a look that clearly showed what she thought of his monster-catching abilities. "Because he'll come back with his friends after."

"Ah. Of course."

He searched around for some other way to comfort her. The dark space under her bed _did_ look oddly sinister. There was even a glimmer of light reflecting off of something that could have been the monster caterpillar's one eye. Gently, mindful of the precious cargo in his arms, he lowered himself to the floor beside the bed. His daughter let out a tiny whimper and tugged tightly at his hair. It was rather painful, but strangely enough, he enjoyed the sensation. When he reached his hand under the bed, she just about had a five year old heart attack.

"It'll eat you!" she breathed.

"I haven't found it yet," he muttered, stretching his arm further. His palm brushed against something soft and furry. "Hang on; I think I've got him."

Faking enormous effort, he dragged the thing out, much to the distress of his daughter, who let out a small, terrified squeak and nearly strangled him with her grip. Once the thing was out, he groped at the base of her bedside lamp and switched it on.

"Look. There's you monster."

A large, ragged teddy bear lay on the floor, light glinting off of it glass eyes. She stared at it blankly for several seconds before sliding down from his shoulder and prodding the furry bundle with her foot. When it didn't move, she turned her head upside down and peered under the bed.

"Are you sure it's not still there?"

He picked up the lamp and shone it under the bed. There was nothing there except dust and a few candy wrappers. His daughter let out a sigh of relief and patted his hair with both hands.

"Thank you Daddy."

He coughed and tried not to look over pleased with himself. "Are you sure you don't want to sleep with your brother tonight?"

She jumped onto the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. "Ew."

"Alright. Goodnight."

She shook her head. "It's morning already. Look." She pointed at the Mickey Mouse clock on her dresser. His gloved hands pointed at just past two.

He smiled and looked quickly away from the clock, already ticking off seconds in his head. "Good morning, then."

Back in the quiet of his own room – he had to constantly remind himself that it was no longer _their_ room – the overwhelming flood of memories pressing down on him was a little easier to bear. He could still smell lilac perfume in the air, but it brought to mind his daughter leaping across the stage as the Flower Queen. If he looked closely, he could see the marker drawings taped over much of the wallpaper. The chipped coffee cup bore the words _Number One Dad_ in block capitals across its sides.

He might have been able to leave it there, already halfway back to normalcy – whatever that was. He might have been able to keep the past in the past, and let his daughter finish piecing his life back together. He might have been able to live again.

If pigs had wings, they might have been pigeons.

The phone chose to ring just then, shattering his fragile web of realities. He snatched up the receiver before it could wake either of his children.

"Hello?"

"_Hello?"_ The voice was distinctly French. "_Is this Monsieur Cobb?_"

"Yes."

"_Monsieur Dominic Cobb? You are the son of Monsieur Stephen Miles?_"

Blood pounded against his eardrums, nearly deafening him. "I'm his son-in-law," he corrected shakily. "Who is this?"

"_I am Doctor Pasteur, Monsieur Miles' doctor at the American Hospital of Paris. You are aware that Monsieur Miles was scheduled for a total hip replacement yesterday?_"

"I-" His mouth was suddenly dry. "Has something happened to him?"

There was a sigh, and then a ruffle of papers on the other side of the line.

"_Monsieur Cobb, I am not permitted to disclose a patient's personal information over the phone. I think it would be best if you came to Paris to see for yourself. The sooner, the better. The secretary at the front desk will know where to direct you."_

A click, the silence of a dead line, and then the all too familiar sense of falling.

Only this time, there was no dream to fall from.


	2. Dotted Dashes

Thanks for the reviews. I have a question: is it permissible to call in-laws by their first name? Or their last name? For the sake of clarity, I've used a little of both, but I'm just wondering what the usual procedure is.

Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.

_- Li_

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><p><strong>S i x D e g r e e s<strong>

_Of Erdős, Shusaku and Karinthy_

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><p><strong><em>p a l m l i n e s .<em>**

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><p>Cobb never quite figured out the spaces in between. Later, when he found time to think back, he would recall only a vague numbness in his extremities and an odd ringing sensation in his ears. One minute he was in bed with the receiver dangling lifelessly from his hand, and the next, he was everywhere at once, packing bags and shaking his children awake. James, groggy with dreams, crawled into his car seat without fuss and immediately dropped back to sleep. Phillipa, on the other hand, was still wide awake from the caterpillar episode, and protested so loudly on the way to the car that the house across the street actually switched on its lights.<p>

"But I don't _want_ to go visit Grandma," she declared for the third time. "She always makes me eat broccoli."

"I know," replied Cobb distractedly. He checked his pocket one last time for his wallet and passport. "Put on your seatbelt."

"Why?"

"Because it keeps you safe."

She pulled a face. "_Why_ do we have to go to Grandma's house?"

In the two o'clock silence, the sound of the van's engine roaring to life grated painfully against his ears. As he pulled out of the driveway, he saw one of his neighbours pressed up curiously against their front room window. He fervently hoped that they would not mistake him for a kidnapper and report him to the police. Saito had promised that all record of any charges against him had been wiped, but he was not willing to take any chances. It would not have been the first time that one of his clients had proved less than truthful.

A sharp kick against the back of his seat drove him from his thoughts. He glanced up at the rear view mirror and saw Phillipa scowling at him.

"Why?" she repeated.

Cobb swallowed. "Daddy has to go on a business trip," he lied. "I'll pick you up when I'm done."

Phillipa kicked his seat again. "How long?" she demanded, and craned her head higher to try and see his reflection.

He tore his eyes away from the mirror and back to the deserted street. He was a practiced liar, but not in front of Phillipa. Never in front of Phillipa. Her resemblance to her mother was too close, and he would always find his left eyebrow twitching at the last, crucial moment.

She used to laugh at him for it.

"Just a few days," he mumbled through dry lips.

"That's what you always say."

The car swerved abruptly to the right as his hand slipped on the steering wheel. In the backseat, Phillipa inadvertently smacked her brother's face with her flailing arm. James mumbled something unintelligible and rolled onto his other side. Heart pounding painfully against his ribcage, Cobb jerked the car onto the side of the street and dropped his hands into his lap, where they continued to tremble uncontrollably. There was nothing else to do. Nothing to say that could overturn the undeniable fact that he had lied before, and more than once. Every phone call from every exotic place on the face of the planet had been a lie to himself, but also to Phillipa. And James. He wondered what his son would say if he was conscious enough to grasp what was happening. Would he accuse him of lying too, or was he still too young to remember or care?

"Daddy?"

He twisted around in his seat to look at his daughter. She stared back at him with wide eyes, watery eyes shadowed by an unnameable presence that did not belong on a child's face. A painful lump rose in his throat. He cleared it quietly, or at least, tried to.

"This time, it will be different," he forced himself to say. "I'll be back before school ends and we'll go somewhere fun for the summer. Deal?"

Phillipa scrunched up her nose and mulled over the offer for a while. "Will you call?" she asked finally.

"Everyday."

"And you won't let Grandma make me eat broccoli?"

He nearly laughed. On any other day he would have, but the lump still lodged in his throat stopped him. "I'll try my best."

She considered it a moment longer, and then stuck out her hand. "Promise?"

The pain in his chest grew tighter and threatened to cut off his oxygen supply, but he closed his finger around her small, childish one and tugged hard on the knot they formed.

"Promise."

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><p><strong><em>b o r d e r l i n e s .<em>**

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><p>Marie Miles lived in one of those bungalow cottages that were always being given away on early afternoon game shows. She had been living there for longer than Cobb cared to recall, although he did clearly remember a time when her husband, too, had lived there, and he himself had been a welcome guest for Sunday brunch. Now, with Phillipa curled up in his arms and James stumbling at his feet, he was not so sure as to what kind of welcome he would get.<p>

He heard the doorbell echoing through the silent house when he pressed it. At first, there was nothing, and then a light flickered on in an upstairs window. After a moment, there was the sound of feet shuffling down steps before the hall light also flashed on and the door clicked open.

"What are you doing here?"

Cobb could not help flinching at her brusque manner. No matter how often he heard it, he could not accustom himself to the sound. It always gave him a strange sense of detachment from his body. Before he could reorient his senses and explain his sudden appearance on her doorstep, she caught sight of James and Phillipa. Her frown became, if possible, even more pronounced.

"What are _they_ doing here?"

"I need you to take care of them for awhile," he replied rather guiltily. "Can we come in?"

But she did not open the door any further. "Mon Dieu!" she hissed. "I thought you said no more jobs!"

"I know, but-"

"That was what we agreed to, remember? You promised."

He felt Phillipa beginning to slip from his grip and shifted her weight to rest more securely against his chest. "Please," he begged. "I don't have any other choice. I have to keep them safe."

She crossed her arms tightly, but her steely glare softened at the sight of James practically sleeping on his father's legs. "I supposed I'll have to let you in," she said with a reluctant sigh, and stepped further back into the hall. "You can put Phillipa upstairs," she added, closing the door behind them. "Better take James with you too. He looks like he's going to keel over any minute. The spare room's just beside the stairs."

"I remember," said Cobb, and was rewarded with a withering stare and a string of French too fast for him to catch. He did not miss the gist of their meaning, though, and hurried upstairs.

Once upon a time, this house had been more familiar to him than his own. He'd visited it countless times, first to share dreams with Miles and later, with his daughter. Here, he'd dreamed of growing old with Mal. But it had been several years since he'd last set foot in the house, and though it _felt_ vaguely familiar, there was much that he did not recognize.

He noticed the pictures first. There was a row of them climbing up parallel to the staircase, one frame for each step. He distinctly remembered that the last time he'd been here – was it really only two years ago? – they had all been family photographs. A pictorial documentation of the Miles family. Now there were only miniature paintings lining the walls, interspersed with the odd postcard.

The spare room was almost completely new. Only the furniture was still as he remembered it, and even then, they had been carefully rearranged. The room which had once been so cluttered with heirlooms and other odds and ends was gone, replaced by cold, bare necessities that reminded Cobb of too many lonely nights spent in foreign hotels, with only his dreams for company. He had no desire to leave his children here, where there was no space to escape from their nightmares.

There was the sound of feet at the bottom of the stairs. "Are you lost?" his mother-in-law called up.

Reluctantly, he set Phillipa on the bed, swung James up next to her, and tucked them both in. For a brief moment, he wondered if he should have taken off their shoes, but it was already too late. As he turned to leave, James reached out a hand and tugged at his sleeve groggily.

"Will you bring me back a toy?" he mumbled between yawns.

The lump returned. Blinking rapidly, Cobb ruffled his sons' hair. "I'll bring back a bag full of them," he promised, and James, satisfied, let go of his arm.

Back downstairs, Marie sat ramrod straight in her chair and stared at him dourly from across the empty kitchen table. She had not offered him anything to eat or drink, not that he would have been able to swallow anything in the first place. Still, it was disconcerting to be stared at, and it didn't help at all that her eyes were the exact same shade and shape as her daughter's.

"Phillipa wants me to tell you that she doesn't like broccoli," he murmured to his knuckles.

"And?"

It amazed Cobb how much disdain she managed to squeeze into the one syllable. His fingers itched to play with the totem in his jacket pocket, but he doubted Marie would appreciate it. He settled for clasping his hands together, tightly.

"Someone phoned me this morning," he said. "They told me that Miles – Stephen – was in the hospital."

She raised an eyebrow. "And you feel that's sufficient reason to leave your children and go gallivanting halfway across the globe?"

"He's sick, Marie," replied Cobb. "The doctor wouldn't say with what, but it must be serious if they're calling."

"And you believed them?"

He glanced up sharply at her impassive face. "Why not?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. But I wonder…"

"What?"

Marie fixed her eyes on the window above the sink, where the sky was already starting to turn a lighter blue. "I know Stephen and I are not on the best terms, but I wouldn't want him to die either. As far as I know, I'm still the first name on his emergency contacts." She suddenly looked back at him and searched his face closely. "Don't you think that the hospital would call me too, if he was really sick?"

Cobb did not miss the tinge of suspicion in her voice. He rubbed his temples tiredly and tried his best to keep the irritated edge out of his own.

"I wouldn't lie about something like this."

"Then why not take James and Phillipa with you?" she shot back. "I'm sure they would cheer him up considerably, if he really is sick. And they've never seen Paris."

"This isn't just about whether or not he's sick," he replied with as much calmness as he could muster. "The last time I saw Miles, he was perfectly healthy. I want to know what made him sick."

"So it is another job!" Marie exclaimed triumphantly. Cobb was seized by a violent urge to shake her until she lost all her mighty superiority and sank into a fear that was as acute as his own, however irrational it might be. He'd learned over the years of extraction that instinct was almost always right. Even Arthur, that perfect model for all things orderly and rational, had once grudgingly admitted it.

He curled his hands into tight fists to hold himself steady, but still his voice shook a little when he spoke.

"It might be," he said quietly. "Or it might just be that his surgery went badly. Either way, I need to know the truth."

"_You _need!" There was the sound of a cough from the upper floor and Marie lowered her voice to a soft, yet nonetheless scathing, whisper. "What about the children? Have you ever thought about what _they_ need? No, don't say anything," she hissed when he opened his mouth angrily to reply. "James might worship the ground you walk on, but he's still young. He doesn't understand yet, and he would idolize anyone who buys him as many toys as you do. But Phillipa – you can't buy love or trust, not even when they belong to a five year old. One day you're going to wake up and realize you don't know your daughter at all. What are you going to do then?"

Cobb stared up at the ceiling. It occurred to him that if he had been born Superman, he would have been able to see straight through the peeling paint and stucco dots and floorboards and carpets to his daughter. She would be sprawled out on her stomach with one hand shoved deep under the pillow, like always. Of course, he would also have been able to fly around the world to see Miles and keep his children safe at the same time. And he would have been able to catch Mal as she fell, so there would have been no need for any of this in the first place.

"I'm hoping I never get to that point," he murmured more to himself than to his mother-in-law.

"You won't be far if you keep on like this."

At the sight of the sunken lines of misery on his face, Marie's expression softened a fraction. "I'll try not to cook too much broccoli," she sighed wearily and stood up. "But really, this is the last time."

"Thank you. I don't know what-"

"I'm not doing this for _you_," she cut in. "You deserve everything you get. This is for James and Phillipa."

He dropped the hand he had been holding out across the table. "Thank you anyway." He stumbled awkwardly to his feet. "Well…I should get going. I still need to find a flight."

She made no move to follow him, but while he was getting into the car, she suddenly opened the porch door again.

"Dominic?"

He looked up at her silhouette framed by the hall light and felt a sudden wave of pity washing over him. In another life, this same rigid woman had always been the laughing centre of any room. Like her daughter, she had possessed the rare gift of being able to capture attention gracefully, without any effort. And now, she was little better than the pale shade of Mal that still lingered in Cobb's memory.

She ran a hand through her greying hair uncomfortably. "If anything happens to Stephen…You'll let me know?"

"Yes. Of course."

Before the door swung shut, he could swear that she almost smiled.

* * *

><p><em><strong>p h o n e l i n e s .<strong>_

* * *

><p>Cobb did not drive directly to the airport. Once he was out of sight of Marie's house, he pulled into the first deserted gas station he could find. He had to knock several times on the door of the tiny adjoining convenience store before the attendant's head finally jerked off his arm. When he saw Cobb peering through the dirty glass, he started in alarm, grabbed a baseball bat of questionable cleanliness from behind the counter and approached the door cautiously.<p>

"I'm armed!" he yelled from behind the flimsy construction. "And the police station is only five minutes from here. You won't get away with this!"

Cobb waved both empty hands in front of the small window. "I'm not here to steal," he shouted back. "I just need to use a phone."

The attendant's shoulders sagged in evident relief. He leaned the bat against the wall and opened the door a tiny crack, just enough for Cobb to slip through. The inside of the store was as rundown as the exterior. One look at the thick layer of dust gathering on the crooked shelves of chips and peanuts told him that he had picked the wrong place. Anyone after him – if there _was_ anyone after him, and he was not merely suffering from some form of persecution mania – would be able to find him from a mile away. He doubted that the attendant had ever had much to do besides sleep. But there was no point in leaving now – he would be remembered as a rare customer regardless of whether or not he actually bought anything.

"I need to make a phone call," said Cobb. "Long distance."

The attendant shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. "The phone is for employee use only…and the manager…" he trailed off into an inaudible string of excuses. Cobb pulled out his wallet and flipped through it deliberately. The attendant's eyes immediately lit up and he stood up straighter. "Of course, I'm sure he would make an exception for a paying customer," he added hastily.

Cobb extracted a twenty and handed it to the attendant. "Five minutes. Privately."

"Of course. The phone is there, beside the fridge. I'll just wait outside until you're done."

He waited until the man had shuffled out the door before pulling his phone from his pocket and scrolling through the numbers quickly. He should have deleted it the moment he'd stepped back onto American soil, but a nagging suspicion that it might come in handy to have a contact in Paris had stopped him. That, and a reluctance to let go.

Now he only had to hope that his architect had not already left.

* * *

><p><strong><em>l i f e l i n e s .<em>**

* * *

><p>"Did you know that slugs have four noses?"<p>

Ariadne craned her neck around the thick stack of books she was sorting through. "Really?"

Her friend, one Lane MacLaurin, waved an old school planner at her from behind his own pile. "I don't know. Are these things trustworthy?"

She grimaced. "Probably not."

"Can I keep it then?"

Ariadne shrugged and returned to weighing the pros and cons of various art textbooks. "If you like."

"Excellent. When you grow rich and famous, I can auction this to some eccentric collector and live off of the proceeds."

"Don't be so sure," she warned him, tossing a ripped up copy of _Art History for Dummies _onto the rapidly growing garbage pile. "I don't even have a job yet, let alone a commission."

Lane snorted in disbelief. "Only because you're so picky. Professor Miles told me you got four offers and you turned them all down. And here I am, still waiting for one."

Ariadne could think of no way to respond without either giving away her secret or sounding incredibly rude, so she shrugged again and pretended to be fascinated by the book she'd just picked up. For several minutes, there was only the sound of rustling pages and the occasional curse from Lane when he dropped a particularly heavy book on his foot. After the third time he had done so, he let out a particularly unpleasant sound somewhere between a groan and a shriek and stood up.

"I need a drink," he mumbled, maneuvering his way between the piles and boxes of odds and ends that had sprung up all over Ariadne's living room floor. "Don't you have anything stronger than iced tea?" he called out in a supremely irritated fashion from the kitchen.

"I don't make a habit of binge drinking on weekends," replied Ariadne with a rather smug grin that Lane, unfortunately, could not see with his head buried in her refrigerator.

"Ha ha, very funny," he muttered, but did not deign to rise any further to her none too subtle dig at his weekend routines. "Ugh. Even your iced tea tastes disgusting."

Ariadne was about to say something about checking the expiry date on the bottle when the obnoxiously loud sound of a rooster crowing burst out from somewhere in the room. She searched her pockets frantically for the source, but could not find it.

"Your phone is in the kitchen!" shouted Lane over the noise, and a white and black blur came flying out through the open doorway. She managed to catch it before it crashed into the vase of flowers balanced precariously on the coffee table. The number flashing on the screen was not a familiar one.

"Hello?"

"_Ariadne?"_

All the blood drained from her head. The world spun in irregular arcs around her until she was certain that she was going to vomit at any minute. Her pulsed jumped erratically against her neck and threatened to burst out of her skin altogether.

"_Ariadne? Are you there?"_

"I-Cobb?"

There was a crackle of static that sounded like a prolonged exhale. _"Yes."_

Her heart stopped altogether for a moment before jumpstarting back at twice its normal pace somewhere in the region of her neck. She stumbled over her words in a rush. "What-Why are you calling?"

"_Will you do me a favour?"_

She took a long breath to steady the bubble of excitement welling up inside her. "A job?"

"_No, nothing like that."_

Her heart plummeted back past its usual place to her stomach. "Of course," she replied and hoped that he would not be able to hear the disappointment in her voice through the phone.

"_I need you to go see Miles for me."_

"What?" asked Ariadne, surprised. "Isn't he getting his hip replaced?"

On the other end, Cobb drew in a sharp breath. _"Who told you?"_

"He did," she answered, now thoroughly confused. "Why? What's going on?"

"_It's nothing. I just thought…Never mind, it's not important. Do you think you can go see him? He's at the American Hospital of Paris. The nurse at the front desk will tell you what room he's in."_

"What – you want me to go now?"

"_Can you?"_

"Of course I can, but aren't you going to tell me anything about it first? I don't think the hospital staff will take too kindly to some college kid sporadically bursting into the surgery room," she added, hoping her explanation would induce him to tell her something about his sudden and strange request. As a matter of fact, she had been to the same hospital numerous times and had found the nurses a little less discrete than was perhaps professional on the matter of patient confidentiality.

"_Tell them you're my sister,"_ suggested Cobb. _"Make up anything you like. I just need you to see him. Call me once you do."_ And he rattled off a chain of digits that Ariadne had to struggle to copy down.

"And you're not going to tell me anything?" she demanded again once he had finished. "Not even what I'm supposed to do when I see him? Or what I'm looking for?"

"_You'll know once you see him. I have to go now."_

"Alright," agreed Ariadne. "I'll call you-"

But Cobb had already hung up.

"What was that all about?" Lane asked from the kitchen. "If you're going to go bursting into a hospital, can I tag along?"

"No," she replied brusquely – too brusquely, for his expression immediately turned into one of suspicion. She sighed. "Look, I appreciate it, but this is kind of personal. One of my dad's friends…and, well, it doesn't look too good for him. I'm just going to drop by the hospital and stay with him until his daughter gets here."

"I see," said Lane slowly. Ariadne was not entirely sure that he believed a word of what she'd said, but there was no time to invent anything more elaborate or convincing.

"I have to go," she said, stuffing her phone into her pocket. Her fingers brushed against the bishop lying inside. She rubbed it gently, whether for luck or comfort, she wasn't quite sure. "You can stay and finish sorting through everything if you want," she added dubiously.

He waved an arm randomly at the living room floor. "And get killed by all this stuff? No thanks. I'll save my good deed of the year for when you actually move. You might need something slightly sturdier than a caveman bicycle to lug all this around."

Ariadne nodded halfheartedly, although with her mind still on Cobb, she had not taken in half of what her friend had said. If she had, she would not have at all taken kindly to his thinly veiled criticism of her beloved bicycle.


	3. The Master of Coincidence

Been awhile since I updated...I've been trying to find time to write, but life is so hectic...and Downton Abbey is so distracting...Sybil and Branson - I faint! I really need to get around to writing something about them...

Excuse my unrelated rambling. Here is the next chapter, far too late. The next one may be even later. Depends on just how many bridges I'm expected to build in the next month. On the plus side, there will be Arthur-ness next time.

Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.

_- Li_

* * *

><p><strong>S i x D e g r e e s<strong>

_Of Erdős, Shusaku and Karinthy_

* * *

><p><em><strong>d i c k e n s .<strong>_

* * *

><p>"You say you're here to see Monsieur Stephen Miles?"<p>

Ariadne nodded and shifted her weight from one sore leg to the other. Evidently, the security at the hospital had tightened up considerably since her last visit. In the past half hour, she had gone through a total of two receptionists and three nurses, all of whom had done their best to be as unhelpful as humanly possible. She had eventually managed to coerce Miles' floor and room number out of one the older nurses with a few fake sobs. Now she was at the entrance to the surgery recovery wing, going through the same process yet again.

The nurse, a woman in her early twenties who looked more like a candy striper, scanned the computer screen with a frown. "And your name is?"

"Ariadne – Cobb," she replied, stumbling just a little over her last name. She decided then and there that she didn't like it. It was too blunt – it might have done for someone with a first name like Dominic, but not for her.

The nurse tapped the monitor with a manicured nail that was at least half an inch over the sanitary limit. "There's a Dominic Cobb on the list of allowed visitors – but he lives in California," she said dubiously, casting a wary eye over Ariadne's small – and very pale and wintry – frame.

"A cousin," said Ariadne smoothly. "He's flying over as soon as he can."

"Well…" The woman fiddled with the ID card clipped to her breast pocket. "Technically, anyone not on the list isn't allowed in…"

Ariadne leaned closer over the desk. "I won't be any trouble," she promised. "I'll just be here until my cousin's flight arrives."

"I suppose…I won't be able to give you any details of his condition…patient confidentiality…"

"Of course. I understand completely."

The nurse hesitated, her eyes darting around the waiting room. Hidden behind the desk, Ariadne crossed her fingers and waited with bated breath. Finally, the nurse relented.

"He's in room five-ten," she said. "Straight down the hall and take a left at the end. It's the first room on the right."

Ariadne thanked the nurse quickly and hurried down the corridor before she could change her mind and call for security. She didn't fancy her chances against the steroid-pumped giants leaning impressively against the hospital's front doors.

Miles' room was nondescript so far as hospital rooms went. The bare walls were painted a pale, minty green that reminded Ariadne of over-chewed bubblegum. A tall window overlooking the parking lot took up most of the right wall and several large, lethal looking machines covered the left one. A standard hospital bed occupied the centre of the room, with a dresser on one side and two vinyl covered chairs in the same shade of green as the walls on the other. A TV screen hanging from the ceiling blared old soap opera reruns across the room.

Ariadne forced herself to focus on the details of the room so she would not have to think about Miles. Her professor's crumpled body lay immobile on the bed, hooked up to more machines and IV drips than she cared to count. Every so often, his chest would rise and fall slightly with the effort of a shallow breath. His face, when she moved closer, was haggard and twice as lined as she remembered it from just a few days ago.

The nurse at the front desk would probably have had a fit, but the thought did not stop Ariadne from brushing her hand against Miles' arm. His skin was warm, but clammy. She traced her fingers over the small cluster of pinpricks surrounding the catheter plugged into his inner wrist and wondered how many bags of fluid had already been pumped into his veins, and how many more were still waiting. Only his pulse, steady if not strong, still felt alive.

The sound of the doorknob turning behind her made Ariadne jump back a foot and crack the back of her knees against the chairs' armrests. A man in a janitor's uniform nodded apologetically in her direction, switched the half filled bio-hazardous waste bin beside the door with an empty one from his gurney, and closed the door, leaving Ariadne alone with Miles again.

* * *

><p><em><strong>p u p p e t m a s t e r .<strong>_

* * *

><p>She tried not to think too much about corpses and autopsies and funerals when she called Cobb an hour later. The call was short, lasting little over a minute. She told him as briefly as she could that Miles was Sick, with a capital S. He replied with a string of muttered words through which Ariadne gathered he was going to take the first flight to Paris. Both of them hung up without saying goodbye.<p>

Cobb had not, in all his mumbled sentence fragments, told her to wait, but Ariadne could not bring herself to leave Miles lying in solitary confinement. The hard vinyl chairs were beyond uncomfortable, even more so than the plastic patio furniture that she used to dream on, once upon a time, but they were more comforting than the alternative: to leave and not know. What, she had no idea yet, but there had to be something there, buried beneath the disinfected sheets. Perfectly healthy people did not drop seriously ill without reason, not even in the surgery room.

Later in the afternoon, a doctor as equally nondescript as the room came in to prod and poke at Miles. He seemed rather surprised to see Ariadne fidgeting listlessly beside the bed and treated her to a deluge of questions. Once she had satisfied him that she was not an escaped patient from the psychiatric ward, he relaxed enough for her to engage him in small talk.

"You are aware that Monsieur Miles had a hip surgery scheduled for yesterday?"

Ariadne nodded. "He told me it was just a routine surgery. That he would be back to normal in a week."

"Well, normally, that would be the case, but…"

She leaned forward eagerly on the edge of her chair and treated the doctor to her most winning smile. "But?"

He coughed and riffled through the stack of pages on his clipboard. "There were some complications during the surgery and the site was infected. Nothing major, it happens all the time. But Monsieur Miles' immune system seems to be having difficulties fighting it. We've been treating him with some antibiotics to help with the recovery process; however, we can't risk overdosing him either."

"But he _will_ recover?" pressed Ariadne. The doctor avoided her gaze and rubbed awkwardly at the pale stubble grazing his chin.

"It's difficult to say. Typically, the chances of a patient _not_ recovering are less than one percent, but at this stage Monsieur Miles has not exhibited any of the typical symptoms. Last night his body temperature skyrocketed and he was delirious. His body simply couldn't handle so much excitement, so we had to put him under again."

"So he's not in a coma?"

"No, no, nothing quite that serious. We're feeding a small dose of somnacin into his system through the IV. He looks like he's in a coma, but his brain function is perfectly normal. As a matter of fact, he had quite a lot of activity going on up there a few hours ago. Probably a dream spike."

Ariadne, who had been nodding along like a model caring family member until then, bolted upright in her chair, adrenaline and alarm pumping through her blood at a record rate. Thrown off by this sudden change, the doctor blinked and stared at her rather blankly for several seconds.

"Are you-"

"I'm fine," said Ariadne automatically, although the gears in her brain were whirring well beyond the safe limit. She sank slowly back into her chair and, for good measure, pretended to twiddle her thumbs. "So...is, er, _Stephen_ going to wake up anytime soon?" she asked, trying her hardest to sound more anxious than excited.

"If his condition improves, certainly. But otherwise he'll have to be kept on the drip for his own health."

At that moment, the door clicked open and the nurse from the front desk poked her head in through the crack. "Call for you downstairs," she said, pointing at the doctor, who nodded at Ariadne and swept out of the room with the kind of self-important flair inherent in all members of the medical profession. The nurse stayed behind to frown disapprovingly at Ariadne.

"Still here?"

Ariadne checked her watch. "My cousin's flight won't be here for another few hours. I thought I'd keep him company until then, make sure he doesn't get lonely."

"The cafeteria closes at two today," the nurse informed her wearily. "He can't _hear_ you, you know," she added, gesturing at Miles, before closing the door with rather more force than necessary. The ancient television above the doorframe rattled but remained intact.

Once she was certain that the nurse wasn't coming back, Ariadne crossed to the other side of the bed, where the IV drip was, and examined Miles' wrist more closely. A plethora of pinpricks dotted the inside, some larger and fresher than others. A few reminded Ariadne of the faint scars that still adorned her own wrist. Compelled by curiosity and the vague impression of some half-formed suspicion, she rolled up the sleeve of her cardigan and held her arm up next to Miles'.

Side by side, old and young, the pinpricks matched exactly.

Her first instinct was one of coincidence. As a child, she had read more Dickens than was perhaps wise, and it had ingrained within her a lasting belief in chance. But although the scars alone, however extraordinarily similar they were, might be passed off on the laws of probability, in conjecture with the so-called dream spikes and Miles' sudden illness, it was too much for even Ariadne's fantastical imagination to accept.

Any sensible person would have called a doctor and alerted the police. A year ago, Ariadne might have done the same, but dreaming had robbed her of her innocent faith in reality. Instead, she took to inspecting every possible corner of the room large enough to conceal a PASIV. A quarter of an hour later, she emerged from behind the ventilator, covered in dirt and dust mites, but no closer than when she'd started. Still, she hadn't had much hope in the first place that they – whoever _they_ were – would have been careless enough to leave it hanging around. Of course, she could have been wrong, and the scars could have been attributed to an inexperienced nurse, but she doubted it.

Someone was playing with Miles' mind.

* * *

><p><em><strong>r o s e n c r a n t z &amp; g u i l d e n s t e r n .<strong>_

* * *

><p>Purple was her favourite colour on Philippa. That much he remembered still, and so he'd dressed her in a bright purple dress with more layers of ruffles than a wedding cake. It reminded her of a pixie, she'd said, on that last day. That was what she'd always wanted to be, what she wanted her daughter to be too. A pixie, proud and free and just a little wild.<p>

But Marie had not approved of his choice. She never did, at least not these days. She blamed him, he knew, but he'd hoped she would let it slide just this once, on this last day. If not for him, than for Mal.

Mal. That had been his little joke, because she had been so troublesome when she was younger. Even before birth, she had kicked and pounded at the muscle and skin keeping her safe until Marie had sworn she could feel tiny teeth snipping away on her insides. When he'd first started to call their daughter Mal, Marie had been livid, but the name had grown on her. That was the name they'd chosen to engrave in her memory.

_Mal Cobb._

He looked across the freshly dug earth at the empty space where Dom should have been. He'd cut loose just two days after Mal's death; to the police and lawyers in charge of the case, it was a sure sign of guilt. And no matter how he tried to convince her otherwise, Marie was inclined to agree. But in the end, it didn't really matter where the guilt lay; he was never going to hear his daughter's laugh again. And Marie thought that it was his fault.

They fought late into the night about the silliest things now: miniscule details that they used to laugh at over coffee. His inability to operate a vacuum. Her bottles of perfume cluttering the sink. Whose turn it was to water the geraniums. Anything to patch up the empty space squeezing its way between them.

He could not bear the thought of losing her too, but she was already slipping through the cracks between his fingers. In the last week he'd counted twenty-three new threads of silver in her hair. Just that morning, he'd caught a glimpse of a new suitcase in the front hall closet. And she had struggled with her dress on her own instead of asking him to zip her up as she'd been doing for the last thirty years. Something fragile had snapped between them, and he could not even find the pieces to fit them back together.

A man he did not recognize nodded at him from the corner of the cemetery and pushed his way through the small crowd of mourners to stand beside the new grave. He wore a plain black suit of the kind worn by every profession under the sun. The man held out his hand and he shook it without thinking. It felt cold and lifeless.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Miles."

Miles nodded numbly and the man continued.

"I'm Constable Raymond with the Los Angeles police department. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your daughter's death."

"I – Now?"

The constable gestured at a police cruiser parked along the street beside the cemetery. Miles wondered how he could have missed it earlier amongst all the black. "Perhaps you could come to the police station with me," said Raymond. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."

Straightening his back, Miles treated him to one of the withering looks that was the terror of his students. "Mr. Raymond, my daughter has just been buried. Is this really the time?"

Raymond laid one hand firmly on Miles' arm. "I'm afraid you'll have to come with me sir. If you try to resist, I will have to place you under arrest, and it will be highly unpleasant for your guests and...ah... your _daughter_."

"On what charges?" demanded Miles, starting to shake with indignity.

The constable pulled a pair of bright silver handcuffs out of his suit pocket. "You are being charged with first degree murder in the death of Mallorie Cobb on the second of June. " He grabbed Miles' wrists roughly with one hand and snapped the handcuffs around them with the other. "You have the right to remain silent," he continued, twisting the cuffs locked and tucking the key in his pocket. By now, the guests in their vicinity had realized what was happening. They backed away as if terrified that Miles' bad luck might be somehow contagious. "You also have the right to obtain a lawyer," added the constable, wrenching Miles around. "If you are unable to do so, one will be assigned to you by the state. Anything that you say can and will be used against you in court."

Up until then, Miles had been limp with disbelief, but he began to struggle violently now. The constable, who had the advantage of being several decades his junior, easily forced him up against a nearby tree.

"Just come quietly," he hissed into Miles' ear. "No need to make a fuss."

Miles tried to open his mouth, but with his face pressed against the rough bark, all that came out was a series of harsh, strangled sounds. His eyes rolled desperately in their sockets, seeking out a sympathetic face in the gathering crowd, one that would be willing to point out the terrible mistake that had been made. Instead, all he saw was accusation. They all wore the same expression – Marie, Philippa, James, his neighbours of the last ten years – a kind of cold glee that justice was being served at last.

* * *

><p><em><strong>p r e s t i g e .<strong>_

* * *

><p>Pretty girls in flowered dresses, couples strolling obliviously down the streets, artists and poets and musicians gathered around little cafe tables; Cobb had forgotten what Paris felt like in the spring. When he stepped out of the taxi, he was struck with a sudden overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Once, long, long ago, he had flown halfway across the world to the same hospital so he could meet his tiny daughter, born nearly a month premature. He had been working with Miles then, and the two of them had made the journey together; Miles, giddy with the excitement of becoming a grandfather, Cobb, feeling distinctly nauseous.<p>

Lost in a cloud of memories, he nearly walked past the petite brunette frantically waving at him from the bicycle rack beside the front doors. It wasn't until she called out his name that he recognized her, and even then, it took him a moment to match the face with the name.

Six months ago, when they'd virtually locked themselves in each others' dreams, he had not expected that he would ever see her again after the Fischer job. Whether incarcerated or at home with the pieces of his family, he knew that he would have no business dreaming anymore. Seeing Ariadne again, like poring seawater over a gaping wound, only further validated his fear.

Once upon a time, he had been like her.

She came hurrying towards him with all the enthusiasm of a child, but when he only stood there, rooted to the pavement, she stopped short, a rare look of indecision clearly visible in her expression. After a moment, she held out her right hand. He grasped it awkwardly, half afraid that they might implode upon contact.

"Cobb."

He coughed, suddenly absorbed by the antics of a sparrow fluttering behind her, but he could only put it off for so long.

"How is he?"

Ariadne fiddled with the end of her scarf, prolonging the inevitable answer. It struck Cobb that they made an odd pair, him in his crumpled suit with a briefcase in one hand and James' flashy soccer bag in the other, her a foot shorter and decked out in jeans and a faded T-shirt. From a distance a passerby might mistake their meeting for an attempted kidnapping. He quickly pushed the thought out of his head. It was only nerves making him think like this.

"You'd better come see," said Ariadne finally, and Cobb felt his heart drop out of his body altogether. So that was what it had come down to. Well, he had always known the day would come when Miles would leave him too, but he had not expected it quite so soon.

The halls of the hospital were crowded with busy staff and anxious families who looked far more hassled despite having nothing to do. They rode up the elevator in mutual silence. Twice, Cobb thought Ariadne was going to speak, but each time she shook her head and kept her mouth shut and eyes downcast. It was behaviour highly unlike that of the eager architect he remembered. Had he been a little less preoccupied with his own thoughts, he might have noticed the change and saved himself some worry. As it was, he endured the short, four-flight ride in silent agony.

The floor that Miles was on was far quieter than the others they had passed. Besides the few visitors lingering behind closed doors, the only people there wore the distinctive white coats of the hospital staff. The nurse receptionist at the front desk frowned when she saw Ariadne and Cobb exit the elevator, but she shook her head when Ariadne stepped towards her and motioned them down the left hand corridor. Heart beating erratically, he followed her.

It was not as terrible as he'd expected. Cobb had been preparing himself to find some gory remnant of his father-in-law lying across the pillow. Miles only looked asleep. Of course, people did not normally sleep while attached to a vast array of medical machinery, but Cobb was willing to take it over the alternatives that had been racing through his head since the night before. He could overlook the distinctly pale pallor of Miles' face and the lifeless arm lying over the covers, at least until the next day.

He took a seat in the hard vinyl chair beside the hospital bed. "I thought..." Cobb trailed off, suddenly conscious of Ariadne still standing by the door, hands shoved deep into her pockets. "Nevermind what I thought," he said brusquely. And then, because Ariadne continued to stare at him with that wide-eyed, knowing look of hers that always made him slightly nervous,

"Thank you."

The words seemed to spur her on. She took a hesitant step forward and uttered the words he had been dreading to hear. "Cobb, there's something you should know."

She withdrew her hands from her cardigan and he saw now that she was holding a small, rectangular something in one hand, which she held out to him. He took it from her with numb fingers.

For the briefest, blissful second, Cobb did not recognize what it was that he was holding. Then, with that dreaded rush that always came flooding back with reality, he recalled the face on the plastic ID card, framed by a curtain of dark, greasy hair, eyes bulging as he was dragged towards the lip of the helipad.

"I took it," Ariadne burst out, and he could tell she had been waiting to say so since he'd arrived. "I didn't know who he was, but I thought you might, so I took it."

"From where?"

"His wallet," she replied, speaking fast and low, with a glance over her shoulder at the closed door. "He came in suddenly, so I hid under the bed and I saw him." She gestured at Miles' arm, the one attached to the catheter. "They've been keeping him under," she continued at a steadier pace. "The doctor said they've been giving him somnacin. And that he's been having dream spikes."

She stopped and looked at him with a myriad of unspoken questions in her eyes.

"I see." He was surprised at how calm his heart was – it seemed to have been beating gradually slower, until he was no longer certain it was still pumping at all. "In that case, you should leave."

"I -" Ariadne froze. "What?"

Cobb stood up and forcefully led her to the door. "This is dangerous, and it doesn't concern you. It would be better if you just left."

"Doesn't concern me?" demanded Ariadne furiously, trying to pull away from him. "Of course it – That's my professor lying there!"

"And _my_father-in-law," said Cobb. "I appreciate what you've done, but there's nothing left here for you now."

She looked like she was going to hit him. At the very least, he was certain that she was going to give him a verbal bashing worthy of Marie. He steeled himself with a reminder that it was all for the best, for everyone, but instead, at the last moment, she whirled abruptly on her heel.

"You can't get rid of me like this," said Ariadne, turning around to face him through the doorway. Her voice was all quiet rationality, which ought to have given Cobb far more cause to worry than any protestation would have. But his thoughts were still on the ID card in his hand, and he closed the door gently, but firmly, in her face.


	4. Destinations

A late Christmas/early New Year's present! I have until January 9 to write like a maniac...maybe an extra week if school goes easy on me. How many chapters do you think I can churn out?

Anyway, this particular chapter is dedicated to **Insane Muse** and also to **Hazelmist**, the former who reviewed two months ago, and the latter, yesterday.

To **Insane Muse:** I'm sorry I left again. I hope you still remember me.

To **Hazelmist**: I hope you enjoy your "glimpse" of Arthur, along with some other members of the team. ^_^ I know I enjoyed writing him...possibly even more than writing poor, tortured soul Cobb. Arthur is just so...methodical. I feel like he could be one of those people who would actually succeed at picking up girls by comparing them to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Or the TI-83, Silver Edition.

As before, I still heart reviews. Like I majorly heart them. So much so that I less than three them. They're also great for de-stressing. Among other things. So please review - it really is appreciated.

**There is one incidence of mild swearing in this chapter, courtesy of the lovable Mr. Eames. Please send all sharp objects in his direction.**

Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.

_- Li_

* * *

><p><strong>S i x D e g r e e s<strong>

_Of Erdős, Shusaku and Karinthy_

* * *

><p><em><strong>l o n d o n c a l l i n g<strong>_

* * *

><p>"Surreptitiously."<p>

"S-I-R-E-P-T-I-S – Shit."

Arthur had the gravity of mind to appear only mildly amused as Eames tossed back another shot of God knew what. All he knew was that it was blue and murky and tasted like aged vinegar and so it was right up Eames' road. Sipping his own gin and tonic, he scanned the rest of the filled-in crossword lying on the counter between them. From long practice, his eyes easily focused in on the longest word in the grid. He almost grinned.

"Discombobulated."

A snort. Another shot of mystery blue. "I _am_ discombobulated."

"."

There was a scuffle as Eames lunged for the crossword, his eyes roaming rapidly. He slammed it back down on the tabletop.

"I'm not stupid, you know. I _can _still read. That word's not even on here. You just made it up to fuck with me."

"Check the dictionary. It's in there."

For a moment, Eames looked like he was genuinely considering the idea. But the attractions of the darkest corner of the most out of way pub in London proved stronger than those of the library three blocks down. He settled for calling for another shot and treating Arthur to a dirty look.

"Do me a favour and get yourself a girl," he said, accepting his drink from the barmaid.

Arthur shrugged carelessly – a little too carelessly perhaps, to convince Eames, but the forger was suspicious by nature. It was part of his job, and the reason he was still alive, but he'd also learned the hard way that Arthur, in combination with hard liquor, was not be trusted.

"I'm working on it."

It wasn't a lie really. He _was _working on it, more or less, if sweet talking his way through each and every one of his last target's secretaries counted as working on it. The problem was that there just always happened to be more pressing worries on hand– not at the moment, perhaps, but something was bound to come up sooner or later. The jobs he pulled always ended up coming back to him, and rarely – no, _never _– in a pleasant way. All in all, it was much more convenient to be on his own, travelling from place to place, never staying put for too long. He knew all too well what happened when you became attached. Settled down. Cobb had been a prime example. It was better to be uncomfortable, better to be empty than hurt beyond repair.

"There's no need to be picky about it, any girl that'll have you will do," Eames continued, stretching back in his chair with a self-satisfied smirk. He winked pointedly at the barmaid, who flushed the same deep red as her earrings.

_Point to me._

Conceding defeat, Arthur dutifully downed the rest of his drink and ordered another. Fortunately for both of them, he was spared from having to respond by an insistent vibration from his jacket pocket. Features perfectly smooth as always, he turned his back to Eames and waited for the caller to announce himself.

"_Arthur?"_

Herself.

"Ariadne?"

He'd always prided himself on his ability to recall any voice once he'd heard it, but his ears no longer seemed to be agreeing with his brain. It couldn't be her – not the petite architect with the insatiable curiosity from the Fischer job. For one thing, he'd changed his phone number, like he always did after every job. For another, the last he'd heard of Ariadne – not that he'd been checking up, it all came trickling down from the grapevine – she'd been accepted into Columbia with a full scholarship. It wasn't something he could see her turning down, and so of course, it _couldn't_ be Ariadne on the other end of the invisible line, the faintest edge of panic pushing its way into her voice.

"Are you okay?" he asked anyway, ignoring the persistent tapping on his shoulder that was no doubt Eames' juvenile idea of fun. "Is something wrong? Do you need help?"

"_No, everything's fine. At least..."_

Ariadne's voice trailed off into white noise, followed by a louder rush of static that Arthur assumed was a sigh. Patiently, he waited for the inevitable. A death, an attack, a disappearance – no one ever called him with good news.

"_Miles is sick."_

A dull ache began throbbing at Arthur's temples. He pinched the bridge of his nose tightly and closed his eyes. Sometimes – and he would never admit this in front of Eames – he hated being right.

"What do you mean by sick?" he asked, hoping that his own meaning was clear. If he had been the superstitious type, he would have crossed his fingers then. Unfortunately, he'd lost his faith in luck sometime around the second grade, and it had never come back. These days, he kept it in the same compartment of his mind as Santa Claus.

More static.

"_He's checked in at the American Hospital of Paris."_

Almost as an afterthought, she added:

"_Cobb's here."_

It was a mark of Arthur's professionalism that he didn't drop his phone. It did, however, slip a few centimetres in his hand. Arthur tightened his grip. So Cobb was in Paris with his father-in-law when he should have been chauffeuring James and Philippa to soccer practice. And Ariadne, who should have been on her way to Columbia, was calling him out of the blue while Eames was here when he ought to have been in Mombasa. Altogether too many people in places they had no business being.

He ended the call without saying goodbye, shoved the phone into his pocket and spun back around to face Eames. The latter raised an eyebrow, having been miraculously restored to sobriety.

"What?"

Eyes narrowed, he said nothing. Already, the gears in his mind were whirring far ahead, planning escape routes and excuses, and more importantly, express tickets to Paris. He had a contact at British Airways who could probably commandeer a jet for him – but on second thought, it might be less auspicious to travel economy.

At the expression on Arthur's face, Eames' eyebrows realigned themselves. His eyes lost some of their inebriated laughter, although his mouth still twitched involuntarily at the corners.

"Ah. It's like that then, is it?"

There followed an exchange of glances, the meaning of which were lost on the barmaid who was eying the two with some interest. It was not every night that a good-looking, well-dressed, and clearly wealthy man dropped in for a drink, the pub being one of the less reputable ones in the city. Rumour had it that a famous crimelord had once been conceived in the private suite just above the bar, although these things were difficult to confirm. So while there was no shortage of balding, middle-aged men with less muscle than they liked to pretend stumbling in and out, it was rare for anyone so _whole_ to visit. And now two on the same night – it would be a long time before the barmaid would forget their faces.

When they left barely five minutes later, leaving behind a generous tip, she could not help feeling a little put out. But her excitement for the night was not completely over yet – once she was sure they were not coming back, she reached for the phone under the counter and hurriedly punched in the digits scribbled across her palm.

* * *

><p><em><strong>p a r i s w a i t s<strong>_

* * *

><p>"Did that barmaid seem suspicious to you?"<p>

It was an hour later, in the carefully pressurized cabin of an Airbus A320, and Eames, to Arthur's deep annoyance, was still there. Sitting beside him in fact, and taking up the entire armrest. He did not deign to answer the question.

"Don't you have somewhere else to be?" he asked instead.

Eames stretched his legs out and leaned back in his seat, apparently greatly enjoying himself. "No. I want to see what Cobb's up to. It's been a while since I worked with anyone halfway decent."

Although he ignored it, the insinuation did not escape Arthur. Subtlety had never been Eames' strong suit – with him, it was always dramatics to the end, which, while excellent for forgery, helped little with his thinly veiled insults.

"Are you giving me the silent treatment now?" said Eames. He sounded extremely amused. "You know that's never worked well for you."

And then, less than a minute later:

"Was that Ariadne who called you?"

Arthur stared resolutely out of the tiny cabin window. It was pitch black outside – not even the lights on the wings were visible. He wasn't going to ask. Eames could toy with him as much as he wanted, he wasn't going to ask. Really, he wasn't. And just to prove to himself exactly how firm his resolution was, he started to recite the capital of every country in Africa. Alphabetically.

_Algeria, Algiers. Angola, Luanda. Benin, Porto-Novo. Botswana, Gaborone. Burkina Faso, Ouagadou-_

"How's Miles doing?"

A beat.

"Alright, Eames, you win. How did you know?"

He regretted it the moment he saw the smirk of delight on Eames' face. He knew it was a mistake to go with African countries. Eames was never going to let him live this down. Elements and their atomic weights would have been much more secure.

"Well," the forger drawled, his grin spreading wider than the Cheshire cat's. "It was obvious really. Elementary. "

Or maybe the digits of pi.

"You didn't notice at all?"

"Obviously," replied Arthur through gritted teeth, and Eames almost leapt through the ceiling with pleasure. Arthur stared out the window again.

_Hydrogen, one point zero zero seven eight two five. Helium, four point zero zero two six zero two. Three point one four one five nine two six-_

"Did that barmaid seem suspicious to you?"

He jerked back to face Eames. "No more than usual."

"Oh, you _are_ losing it, Arthur. Point man like you, can't play spot the differences? Pity."

"Better that than a forger who can't spell," Arthur shot back, riled beyond his limit. His left hand was actually gripping the armrest. He gave it a small shake and waited for the circulation to return to his numb fingers.

"Touché," Eames murmured, although he sounded considerably more subdued than he had been just ten seconds ago. He eyed Arthur carefully.

"You've got a tail, did you know that?"

Instinctively, Arthur's eyes ran a quick once-over of the cabin. They were conveniently seated in the second last row. Behind him was a couple with, judging from the persistent kicking to the back of his seat, a young child in tow. They were out – the child was a good distraction, but no tail would ever draw so much attention to himself. An elderly woman, probably Czechoslovakian, and her very much English niece occupied the seats in front. Hired by an obscure European company he'd crossed once in his work – possible, but not probable. Across the aisle, beside Eames, was a newly married French couple on their honeymoon. Again, possible, but not probable. In front of them was a middle-aged man dressed in a crisp suit made from imported silk. He was sleeping, but anyone could put on a show of lolling head and soft snoring. The most likely candidate, if only Arthur had not recognized him the moment he got on the plane as the owner of a chain of very successful strip clubs in Brooklyn. All underground of course, but not the kind that he was looking for. In fact, nobody on the plane seemed like a potential threat.

"Who's the tail?" he asked reluctantly.

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"Eames-"

"I _can_ tell you one thing," interjected Eames. "It's not who you think it is. It's not Fischer."

"Thank you, that narrows it down considerably," Arthur replied acidly.

In fact, he had not been thinking of Fischer at all. He knew for certain that the one-time heir had no recollection at all of their foray into his dreams. It had been the first thing he'd made sure of, once he'd judged it safe to surface in the corporate world again. The secretary had proved extremely knowledgeable once he'd gotten a few cocktails and some well-placed compliments in her. Fischer had no memory of the inception, and so Fischer could not have been his tail. Elementary.

"Did that barmaid seem suspicious to you?" Eames asked again, out of the blue.

Arthur suppressed a groan. One of these days, he was going to figure out why he put up with Eames. But until that day came...

"Do we have to go through this again?"

Eames cleared his throat loudly with the air of one explaining to a particularly dim toddler why one plus one equalled two.

"Solitary barmaid. Middle of the dumps. She's probably lucky if she can get ten customers a night, and that's including the non-paying ones. Probably has a few other jobs on the side, not all of them savoury."

Arthur tapped his fingers on his leg. Universal language for _get on with it._ Eames rolled his eyes.

"And it doesn't strike you as odd that a girl like that can afford-"

"Diamond earrings?" finished Arthur, sounding very unimpressed. "Yes, I saw that. Fancy reds, I'd guess, or high quality rubies. So someone paid her to keep an eye on me in the bar, is that what you're saying?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that," Eames replied. "She wasn't exactly keeping an eye on you, per se."

Something clicked in Arthur's brain, something that he had been tinkering with for a while. Ever since Eames had sought him out at the hotel with some transparent story about looking up an old friend that they both knew was a lie. He had never been Eames' favourite person in the world, and it took a lot to get Eames out of Mombasa –

Mombasa.

Eames smiled. Grinned, in fact, and rubbed his hands together.

"Caught on, have you? Excellent."

* * *

><p><em><strong>a r o o m w i t h a v i e w .<strong>_

* * *

><p>"<em>This is a long distance call. Please wait while we transfer you."<em>

The sound of static, and then the click of a receiver. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.

"_The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try again later, or leave a message at the tone."_

More static, followed by a long beep.

"_This voicemail service has not been activated. Please try again later."_

Frustrated, Ariadne dropped her phone on the floor, and immediately regretted it when it landed on her foot. Muttering curses under her breath, she redialled Arthur's number again from memory. She'd dialled it so many times by now that she could probably have called him in his sleep. That is, if he would pick up. And even then, she would have to count on him not hanging up in the middle of the call.

"_The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try again later, or leave a message at the tone."_

She was still pacing up and down her living room floor, phone in hand, receiver propped up on her shoulder, when someone knocked loudly on her front door. Actually, it was more of a violent pounding than anything else. She dropped her phone on the coffee table and ran to get it. It was probably Lane, who had been calling her non-stop himself, cramming her voicemail with messages. She knew she'd promised to call, but the boy really needed to learn some patience. And restraint, she thought, as the pounding persisted. She wrenched the door open.

"Lane, I told you I'm fine, so would you quit – Oh."

Arthur stared down at her with what she guessed was an expression of mild curiosity, although with Arthur, it was always difficult to tell.

"Who's Lane?"

She stared and wondered how he had got in without being buzzed up. Letters and angry phone calls to the security office seemed in order. What kind of story had he fed them anyway? Everyone in the building knew she had no family on this side of the Atlantic.

"Ariadne?"

At the sound of her name, the blood drained from her fingertips, leaving them numb and tingling. She shivered.

"You hung up on me," she replied rather stupidly and immediately wanted to kick herself all the way around the block. She caught sight of him eying the phone dangling from her coffee table and hurriedly pushed it upright, replacing the receiver on its hook. "I tried to call you again, but I couldn't get through," she said by way of explanation.

Make that two kicking trips around the block.

"I had to get a new phone."

"Oh. Of course."

Silence stretched out in the empty room, threatening to deafen them. She could swear that her neighbour's baby had been hollering just seconds ago, but no, it was silent on the other side of the wall.

"I'm here now," said Arthur unnecessarily, and Ariadne almost jumped. _Jumped._ She never _jumped._ What was the matter with her? She felt like she was sixteen again, waiting for Billy Mulligan to deliver the mail.

But that was ridiculous. Billy Mulligan had looked nothing like Arthur.

"Yes. Right. Come in."

She stepped back and he stepped forward, the same as he had been when she'd last seen him in a Los Angeles airport. Same slicked back hair, same focused expression, same calm voice. Not the same suit, she noted with some surprise. In fact, he wasn't even wearing a suit, just a button-down shirt and slacks. For Arthur, it was the definition of casual. Maybe that was what was throwing her off – the lack of a tie and vest. He looked almost underdressed.

"How do you know where I live?" she asked, because there was nothing else left to say after months apart, given what had happened. _Especially_ given what had happened. She bit her lip and winced when she tasted blood.

"Phone book," said Arthur simply.

No, definitely three trips. Maybe even four.

He looked around her living room with interest, taking in the stacks of books and cardboard boxes. His gaze lingered on the suitcase lying open beside the sofa, empty except for the litter of receipts and candy wrappers lining the bottom. She'd been going to empty out the contents of her wardrobe into it, when Cobb had called and derailed her plans for the day. Perhaps longer. _Perhaps forever_, said a snide voice at the back of her head.

"Moving?"

"I don't know," Ariadne admitted, and wondered why they were making small talk. Very boring small talk at that, asking questions they both already knew the answer to. Funny, but they'd never done that before; usually it had been work, work and more work, with the occasional discussion of Cobb's former love life. And mazes. Lots of mazes. Too many mazes.

"Have you seen Miles yet?" she asked, remembering, with some difficulty, why he was suddenly here, at her apartment, in her living room. The entire conversation felt ridiculous. _She _was being ridiculous. And he wasn't helping.

Arthur shook his head. "Eames is at the hospital right now. Nurses are a speciality of his."

"Eames?" repeated Ariadne, raising her eyebrows.

In her amazement, she forgot to be awkward, and the result was that she sounded much more like Ariadne the Architect and much less like Ariadne the Girl. She had not expected Arthur to call the forger too – colleagues they might have been, but they had always given her the nagging feeling that something was not quite right in the room, whenever they were together. It was the same feeling she got watching two players in the faceoff circle, or two rams with their horns lowered, getting ready to charge. Call it superstition or paranoia or imagination on her part, but she was almost certain that there was some kind of silent, testosterone-fuelled war of egos going on between the point man and the forger.

"He's been tailing me," said Arthur, scowling still at the memory of Eames' delighted expression, "on Cobol's orders." With every word he spoke, he could see Ariadne's eyebrows traversing further and further up her forehead until they threatened to disappear altogether into her hair.

"Cobb and I did a job for Cobol once," he explained to her. "Right before the Fischer job. We were supposed to extract expansion plans from Saito. We didn't deliver, and they've been after us since. They hired Eames to follow me."

"And now they're using Miles to get to Cobb?"

It wasn't a question, really, even if she'd phrased it as one, because truth be told, she had been expecting something like this when Cobb had called her. It would certainly explain Cobb's insistence that it had nothing to do with her. Of course, she thought wryly, it could also just have been his usual pigheaded refusal to tell anyone anything.

"It's possible," said Arthur slowly. He stopped surveying the cluttered details of her living room and turned to face her. Any vagueness or pretence of it was gone and he was once again all business, like she remembered. "When you said that Miles was sick, did you mean that someone put him under?"

"Yes."

She observed him closely for any signs of worry, but as always, his expression was inscrutable. If possible, it had become even harder to read since she'd last seen him, but perhaps she was just out of practice.

"How do you know?"

"I saw him."

Quickly, Ariadne filled him in on what had happened from the moment Cobb had called her, to his arrival at the hospital, and her subsequent forced dismissal. She left out the details of just how her professor had looked, lying pale and still on fresh hospital sheets, or how his son-in-law had sounded across the static of the phone.

"So I had to call you," she finished. "Cobb wasn't listening to sense and I couldn't let him face whatever this is on his own."

Arthur had heard her story in silence. Now, he checked his watch. "How long has it been since you came back from the hospital?"

It seemed an odd question to ask, but Ariadne refrained from saying so. She chewed on her lip. "Four, maybe four and a half hours. Why?"

"Pack your things; you're coming with me to the hospital."

"I – What?"

She had been prepared for more of Cobb's stubbornness from Arthur, more warnings about minding her own business. The last thing she had expected was to be ordered to pack up her belongings and_ leave._ Doubtful, she stood where she was.

He read the unspoken question in her eyes. "Cobol's not stupid – by now, they'll know the address, bank account and second cousin of everyone Cobb and I have worked with in the last year. And if Miles is under, then they'll have surveillance at the hospital too. They'll know that Cobb contacted you, and that you called me."

"So I'm not safe here anymore," Ariadne summarized, catching on to what Arthur was saying.

"No." Arthur rubbed his jaw, and for the first time, she felt the tiniest crack in his composure. "Cobb will be sorry he called and dragged you in. But you're part of this now, whether he wants it or not."

"Well, I'm not sorry," she said. It was a rash, spur-of-the-moment thought spoken out loud, but she didn't regret it. It was the truth, or as close to the truth as she had been in a long time. And the truth was that she had missed it, craved it even – the adrenaline of being part of something not altogether legal, the excitement of the unknown, and beneath it all, the thrill of pure, unhindered creation.

_There's nothing quite like it._

Arthur studied her closely. His lips twitched into a smile when he glimpsed in her eyes all the possibilities soaring and building themselves in her mind.

"Neither am I."


	5. A Wicked Gang

I'm sorry. I really am. Engineering is fun but ... *insert choice of expletive here*.

Anyway, school's over until September, so I'm going to try and finish this story before then, if I can manage to crawl out of bed in the mornings.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed, alerted and favourited this story, even though I completely abandoned it for a few months. I don't deserve you guys.

Reviews are deeply appreciated. And loved. And adored. Etc.

Props if you know where the title and various subtitles comes from... :P

Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan.

_- Li_

* * *

><p><strong>S i x D e g r e e s<strong>

_Of Erdős, Shusaku and Karinthy_

* * *

><p><em><strong>t h e o n e f a l l s d o w n<strong>_

* * *

><p>Eames met them outside the hospital, his expression abnormally subdued.<p>

"Cobb's not here," he informed them, casually pushing himself off the concrete pillar he had been leaning against and walking with them into the lobby. "Miles has been moved too, into the intensive care ward. Only immediate family members allowed." His glanced over his shoulder at Ariadne. "I'm guessing they noticed your little excursion earlier."

"No back doors?" Arthur asked, jamming his finger impatiently into the "up" button beside the row of elevators.

Eames shook his head. "It's a fortress in there. They don't want any bio-hazardous waste entering or leaving without authorization. It's a good excuse," he said, "keeping Miles there. No one will think it odd if he's secluded up there."

The elevator arrived with a soft, musical _ding_. As the three of them stepped into the empty lift, a harried looking man in a rumpled suit waved wildly at them from the other end of the lobby to hold the door. Eames waved back with a smile and forced the elevator doors shut.

"Charming."

"Sorry to disappoint you princess, but I don't fancy being overheard."

Ariadne almost grinned. "It's nice to see you too Eames."

His eyelid flickered briefly in what might have been a wink. Arthur caught the exchange and coughed. Eames chuckled. Repressing a smile, Ariadne looked away as the memory of a flickering moment that had never really happened floated to the front of her mind.

"So there's no way in or out?" asked Arthur, either completely oblivious to the sudden static in the air, or choosing to ignore it. Ariadne was willing to bet most of her possessions that it was the latter.

"Not without these," Eames replied dramatically, pulling out a tangle of plastic and lanyards from his breast pocket. "Visitor passes," he explained, handing one each to Arthur and Ariadne. "Nicked them from the nurse up front."

Slinging the lanyard around her neck, Ariadne glanced sideways at Arthur. "Nurses are a speciality of his?" she whispered under her breath.

"In more ways than one," Arthur answered, and she decided that she really didn't want to know any more than she had to. Nevertheless, her curiosity begged to know if Arthur had any specialities. She would have to find out some time.

They got out on the fifth floor and followed Eames through an intricate maze of corridors that all looked exactly the same, even to Ariadne's practiced eye. Eames brought them to a halt in front of a locked door that was identical to every other one on the floor – there were no distinguishing characteristics other than the room number. How Eames had managed to figure out which room Miles was in was a mystery to her, one that was soon superseded by the key card he swiped through the door's lock.

"Nurse again?" she guessed, as he held the door open for her, and this time, he did wink.

The room was almost exactly the same as the one Ariadne had been in earlier that day. The only discernible difference was the absence of the television and white furniture instead of green. Miles lay motionless in the middle of the room, his face a shade paler than she remembered. His arms lay above the hospital blanket, and this time, the pinpricks on their surface were clearly visible. Fluid from the IV beside the bed dripped steadily through the catheter sunk into his wrist.

Eames let out a low whistle. In the silence, it was almost deafening.

"He's definitely been under once too often. Look at his wrists."

"Look at his eyes," Arthur replied dully.

At first, Ariadne didn't know what he was talking about. Miles' eyes were closed, as they should have been. She stepped closer to the bed to stand beside Arthur. The gasp escaped her before she could catch her breath.

Miles' eyes were jumping violently beneath his eyelids, rolling madly in their sockets. As she watched, his eyelids twitched open a little, and she caught a glimpse of his sclera, shot through with veins of red. She took an involuntary step away, brushing against the sleeve of Arthur's jacket as she did so.

"What's happening to him?" she asked, and she hated that her voice was shaky despite her best efforts.

"He's dreaming," said Arthur simply. Ariadne had never heard him sound so defeated. She chanced a glance at his face, but it was unreadable as always.

"It's not a very pleasant dream, is it?" muttered Eames, who, for the first time, had completely lost his look of enjoyment, and finally seemed as equally worried as Arthur and Ariadne. The sudden change did nothing to assuage Ariadne's fears.

Arthur did not reply. He closed his fingers around Miles' wrist, the one with the needle, and counted off ten seconds on his watch.

"His heartbeat's skyrocketing," he said, stepping back from the bed. "If they keep him like this for much longer, he might not be able to come back."

"Let's do it now then," said Ariadne, and she reached out to tug the catheter from Miles' arm. Arthur pulled her back quickly.

"You can't just end a dream like that," he told her, keeping his hold on her wrist. "Especially not one like this. The shock of waking up would be worse than the dream. He could end up like-"

"-Mal," Ariadne finished, remembering the shade of her professor's knife-wielding daughter that still haunted her nightmares sometimes. She withdrew her hand. "Then what do we do? We can't let him stay like this."

"We might start," Eames suggested, "by finding that extractor you told Arthur about."

* * *

><p><em><strong>l i a r t h i e f k i l l e r c r e e p<strong>_

* * *

><p>The elevator stopped on the second floor with another <em>ding<em> and the doors slid open to reveal a janitor pushing a large, metal crate in a trolley. He ducked his head when Ariadne stepped past him on her way out, muttering something which might have been a greeting. It was difficult to hear anything past the curtain of long hair on either side of his face –

She whirled around just in time to stick her foot between the elevator doors, forcing them open. In his surprise, the janitor made the mistake of looking up. The moment their eyes met, Ariadne recognized him as the extractor in Miles' room.

She lunged instinctively at him, but Arthur was faster. In one swift movement, he had moved past Ariadne and pinned the extractor against the elevator wall by the neck. His trolley crashed sideways to the floor and the crate split open, sending two PASIVs and spare catheters clattering over the vinyl tiles.

"Take his stuff," Arthur spat out through clenched teeth, dragging the extractor out into the hall.

"What-"

"Just do it," said Eames, picking up one of the PASIVs. "Don't try to mess with Arthur when he's in a temper. Trust me, I've been there. Often. It's not pretty."

Rather reluctantly, Ariadne swallowed the questions burning in her throat and picked the scattered contents of the trolley off the floor, all while trying to ignore the muffled sounds of the extractor's futile attempts to escape from Arthur's hold. They dragged the overturned trolley and the extractor into the nearest empty room, a men's washroom at the end of the hall. Only after they had locked and barricaded the door did Arthur let the extractor go. He staggered against the sink, massaging his windpipe.

"Please," he rasped out, "don't kill me."

"You're supposed to be dead already," said Arthur. "Who did you sell us out to this time?"

His voice was calm – extraordinarily so – and yet Ariadne had never seen him so angry before. She recalled his constant irritation around Eames, even his flashes of anger at Cobb, but this – this was different. Cold, inescapable fury that frightened Ariadne more than Cobb's psychotic dream-wife ever had.

"It was Cobol," spluttered the extractor, backing away from Arthur. For a moment, Ariadne came close to pitying him, until she remembered Miles' lifeless face.

He gasped loudly for air. "They made me do it, I swear. I had no choice. You know what Cobol's like. They would have killed me."

"And you would have deserved it," Arthur replied coldly. "What did you tell them?"

The man actually snivelled. Ariadne looked away, disgusted, and met Eames' eye. His attention kept darting back and forth between their – for lack of a better word, prisoner, and Arthur, like some kind of silent tennis rally. The expression on his face gave Ariadne the impression that he found the entire situation to be extremely entertaining. The mood was contagious, and she found herself holding back an inexplicable snigger.

"Everything," the man was saying, and Ariadne's attention snapped back to him. He was no longer sniffing, but his voice was still shaky. "How we got in, Saito's reaction, his test – everything."

"Did you tell them why we failed?"

His Adam's apple bobbed visibly as he swallowed, hard. "No," he admitted. "They – they didn't ask."

"Of course."

The entire exchange was starting to strike Ariadne as extremely odd. It wasn't just Arthur's unreasonable anger; something akin to familiarity lingered between the two men in front of her, one kneeling in front of the other. She wanted to ask Eames, to see if he was as confused as she felt, but his expression was even harder to read than Arthur's.

Out of nowhere, Arthur suddenly pulled out a gun and pointed it steadily at the extractor's head.

"Why don't I do Cobol a favour and finish you off?"

"No!"

Cowered between the sink and mirror, his hands shaking in the air, the man cut a pathetic figure that was nothing like what Ariadne knew of extractors. He repulsed her, but neither did she want him sprawled on the floor, blood splattered over Arthur's hands. She made to move towards Arthur, but she need not have bothered.

"I'll tell you everything," gasped the man, sinking to his knees. "Anything you want. Just don't kill me."

Arthur lowered his aim slightly, keeping his finger ready on the trigger. "What does Cobol want from Miles?" he asked.

"Nothing," the extractor sobbed in response. "All I had to do was keep him under. Keep him sick enough to get Cobb's attention."

"So he's bait."

"What did I keep telling you?" Eames muttered, but only Ariadne heard him.

"Yes," the extractor replied clearly relieved that they were taking the news so well. "Cobol still wants payment for the job. They said someone was tailing you too," he added, glancing sideways at Eames with a plea in his eyes.

"Not a very good one," said Arthur carelessly, and Eames scowled. It amazed Ariadne how they never missed an opportunity to jilt each other, even in the middle of a hostage situation.

_Hostage situation_? She really had to lay off on the late night thrillers.

"Is that all Cobol wants?" Arthur demanded. "Revenge?"

"I told you, I don't know. They wouldn't tell me anything."

"In case someone got to you and you blurted out the whole thing?" Eames asked sarcastically. He received a dirty look from Arthur in return for his efforts.

"Please," the man begged. "Believe me."

Arthur glanced at his watch, and then lowered his gun.

"Get out," he ordered, and the extractor nearly fell over himself in his rush to the door.

* * *

><p><em><strong>a t a n g l e d w e b<strong>_

* * *

><p>"I'm impressed," said Eames, sitting up and disconnecting himself from the PASIV on the floor. "Not that I'm complaining, but I had no idea you had it in you to hold a gun to a man's head and mean it."<p>

Arthur did not even look at the forger. "Just pack everything up," he instructed, pushing himself off the tiled floor of the men's bathroom. "We need to get out of here and find Cobb."

"I've already got a contact of mine in the hotel business on it," said Eames, winding up the rubber tubing on the floor. "But what are we going to do about this idiot?" he asked, gesturing at the unconscious extractor still lying on the floor. "I really don't fancy taking him with us."

"Leave him here," Arthur instructed. "He'll be too scared of what Cobol will do to him to tell them anything about us."

Ariadne sat up herself. "Speaking of him, is there something you're not telling us? Like how you know this guy?"

"It's got nothing to do with you-" Arthur began, but she cut him off.

"You know, I called you because I thought you would be different, but you sound just like Cobb."

Arthur shut his mouth abruptly and looked at her, really _saw_ her, for the first time since he'd knocked on her door. It was a little disconcerting to be under the scrutiny of his microscopic gaze, but Ariadne stared back at him, determined not to be kept in the dark again. Arthur turned away first, returning his gaze to the extractor.

"His name's Nash. He was the architect when we were working for Cobol Engineering, before the Fischer job. He messed up and when we failed, he tried to sell us out to Saito in exchange for his own life. I thought Cobol would have finished him off, but he's obviously been able to sell them more information."

There was silence when he finished, broken by Eames snapping the PASIV lid closed.

"Lovely story, really touching, but that man's going to wake up in approximately thirty seconds, and it won't be sunshine and rainbows when he does, so unless you fancy spending the rest of your natural life staring at the back of your head, I'd get out of here."

He unlocked the bathroom door and held it open for Ariadne and Arthur.

"Ladies first."

* * *

><p><em><strong>p a i n t e d r u s t<strong>_

* * *

><p>When the Fischer job had finished, he'd stepped off the plane into the arms of his children, hoping that he would never have to leave them again. Hoping that he would he would be able to pick up what was left of his life and piece it together. Hoping that he would never have to be here again; in another city, another hotel room, his revolver and totem lying side by side on the bedside dresser beside the silent phone.<p>

It was amazing how quickly time could fall away, as if the months at home had been nothing more than a long dream.

With a quiet sigh heard by no one, Cobb picked up the ID card Ariadne had given him, the one she had stolen from the extractor, and turned it over in his hands. The name was different, of course, the hair a little longer, and the eyes more wary than they'd been the last time he'd seen them over the lip of a helipad. He never forgot the face of anyone he worked with, and he certainly wouldn't forget the face of the only man who had ever tried to save his own skin by selling out the rest of his team. Extracting wasn't exactly legal and business allegiances changed all the time, but it was an unwritten rule that the safety of the entire team came second only to information.

Nash was, by all standards, a despicable human being. It certainly didn't help that he was now trying to ruin the one man that Cobb had always been able to turn to for advice. And Cobb had no doubts as to who had sent him here in the first place. It was common knowledge in the business that Cobol Engineering did not accept failure; the extraction on Saito had been the worst of its kind. He was surprised they hadn't gotten to him sooner.

The phone on the nightstand burst into a series of loud rings, blaring through Cobb's thoughts. He snatched it up halfway through the second ring, before he remembered that no one, not even Marie, knew where he was staying.

"_Aren't you eager."_

Cobb stayed silent, waiting with bated breath. The voice at the other end chuckled.

"_I know you're there, Mr. Cobb, even if I can't hear you. Don't waste my time pretending otherwise."_

"Who are you?"

"_I'm afraid I can't tell you that. Classified information and all that. What I can tell you is that I am a representative of Cobol Engineering, and I have to say, they're not all that pleased with you at the moment. But you know that already, don't you?"_

The voice waited for him to reply. When he didn't, it sighed heavily.

"_You're a difficult man to find, Mr. Cobb. Very difficult. We were almost afraid you wouldn't come for your father-in-law, but it seems our source was correct after all."_

Cobb stiffened. "Who's your source?"

"_Nobody you need to concern yourself with. If I were you, I'd be more worried about your father-in-law."_

"What do you want with him?"

"_It's not really a question of what I want from _him_. Stephen Miles has served his purpose already. No, it's a question of what I want from _you_. I should think the answer to that would be obvious."_

"I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about," said Cobb, faking confusion.

"_Don't play games with me Mr. Cobb,"_ the voice snapped. _"It doesn't suit you. Besides, Monsieur Miles really can't afford any more mishaps at this point."_

The words slipped out before he could catch them:

"Don't touch him."

"_I wouldn't dream of touching him,"_ replied the voice, sounding very much amused. _"So long as you deliver."_

"Deliver what?"

"_Must I spell it out for you?"_

A beat.

"_Put simply, I want Saito gone."_

"Gone," Cobb repeated sceptically. "You know Extraction doesn't kill-"

"_Oh, I don't want him dead. No, that would be too painless for him. I want Saito to suffer. Financially. Emotionally. I want his business finished. His life destroyed. You get the picture."_

"How-"

"_I don't care how you do it as long as he's ruined. Soon. Tell you what, I'm a generous man. Take a month. Two months if you want. But remember, the longer I have to wait, the longer Monsieur Miles stays under. And don't even dream of trying to free him yourself."_

An abrupt click and the line went dead. Cobb held the phone frozen to his ear for a few more seconds before setting it gently back on the dresser, his mind a blur.

Out of the myriad of thoughts bursting through the seams of his brain, one stood out clearer than the rest. _Miles._ He had to make sure Miles was safe, that nothing happened to him. He owed him that much. And for that, he needed Saito.

_Saito_. That was a considerably bigger problem. Normally, he would have had no qualms about switching sides – it was the way corporate espionage functioned, and anyone who stayed loyal to only one employer was bound to find themselves out of work sooner or later. But Saito was different. He hadn't just been another aloof employer. He had been, however grudgingly, a member of the team and Cobb, however much experience he gained, was still naive enough to believe in honour amongst thieves.

There was also the small matter of owing his newly found freedom to Saito. If Cobb turned on him now, he would never be able to look at his children's faces without seeing Saito's, lined and twisted with pain. Yet if he didn't, he would never be free, and he would spend every waking minute in agony, wondering who would be next to go. For if he was certain of anything, it was that Cobol would not give up on him. Either way, Cobb knew the result would be the same.

_An old man, filled with regret, waiting to die._

Out of habit, he picked up his totem and dropped it, perfectly centred on its point, onto the dresser. It was a game he played with himself, letting his mind spin in tandem with the top, wavering between his options.

_Miles. Saito. Miles. Saito. Miles. Saito. Miles-_

The top toppled loudly, leaving another dent in the already heavily scratched surface of the desk. Cobb stared at it blankly for a minute before snatching it up and shoving it deep into his pocket, his decision made. The revolver followed the top into his suit, and then Nash's ID card. He thought about calling, just in case, when his eyes fell on the bedside phone, but there was really nothing left to say. Only whispered words across the ocean that would be twisted into yet another broken promise.

He made one last unnecessary check of the room, seeing as he had not had time to unpack more than the contents of his jacket pocket, slung his bag over his shoulder and opened the door. He only just managed to stop himself from colliding into the petit brunette leaning against the outer wall.

She glanced up at him through her lashes with a casual smirk that he could swear she had picked up from Eames.

"Going somewhere?" she asked innocently.

Cobb fixed his eyes determinedly on the wall, the ceiling, the hall lamp, anywhere but her. "Ariadne," he said firmly, "go home."

He did not want to know how she had found him in the most out of the way hotel in the city, signed in under a false name with a counterfeit passport. He did not want to ask her these things, because speaking it aloud would cement her presence in this mess, in this _life,_ and he knew he would never be able to pull her out until it was too late.

Miles had been right. She was too curious, too talented, too hungry for more than reality could give her. Too much like him. He had to admit it was what had made him trust her so definitely in the first place, that spark of hope that she would understand. And she had.

But this, this was too much. This was not her fight. He had to make her see that.

"I'm not going anywhere," Ariadne said before he could fish out another excuse as to why exactly she couldn't be here. "And don't tell me you don't need me because I doubt you'll be able to take down Cobol on your own."

Cobb's mask slipped for a moment. "Who told you about Cobol?"

"Arthur," replied Ariadne with the faintest upward curve of her lips. "He told me about Nash and Saito too." She wasn't sure why she added the last bit, other than perhaps to convince him how deeply she was already entrenched in this whole business.

"Arthur." Cobb rolled the name on his tongue hesitantly. It had been a long time since he'd spoken it, and it felt rusty and out of use. Funny how two simple syllables could bring back years and lifetimes. In all his years of working, he had never met anyone else he would rather trust his back with. Determined as he was to figure out the Cobol problem on his own, he couldn't resist asking.

"Is he here too?"

"He's waiting in the car with Eames," Ariadne replied. "I called them," she elaborated when Cobb half raised an eyebrow. The look of skepticism he had been giving her changed into one of shrewd calculation that he normally reserved for suspicious targets. Ariadne shoved her hands in her pockets and stared back at Cobb with equal determination.

"Look, I'm not trying to shove myself where I don't belong," she said as evenly as she could. "But you're not going to get anywhere on your own, and I'm involved already, whether you like it or not. Miles is my professor and I'm pretty sure that Nash will recognize me after the hospital-"

Cobb held up a hand. "Wait, you said he was under when you took his wallet."

Ariadne lifted one shoulder in a helpless half shrug. "Well, I went back with Arthur and Eames afterwards to find him..."

Cobb dropped his hand and ran it over his face. He suddenly looked older, more careworn, like Miles. Ariadne wondered if she should apologize.

"Eames and Arthur are downstairs?" Cobb asked wearily and she nodded.

He picked up his bag from the floor beside him. "Alright then, let's go before Cobol sends somebody else after us."


End file.
